Happy Monday!!! I had cleaners come in this morning, which was AMAZING. All the grime of the kitchen deconstruction, neatly removed, and my house looks pleasant again. Well, until the next batch of workman come through and mess it up.
Continue readingYou know the Oscars aren’t really about objective quality, right? There’s all kinds of things that go into it, that end up with the exact same kind of people and things on the list every single year. As a mental challenge, I am going to break down the categories I see and then we can see if you can find them in Indian film. And to make this hard but not impossible, I’m gonna limit it to 2018-2019.
Continue readingI was going to make this simply “best”, but that’s subjective. Of course this is subjective as well, but I give you a clear definition.
Continue readingWell, this is an odd list! And it inspired me to do a bit of research on how these names are chosen and what it means and what the process is.
It’s not nearly as egregious as choosing Jeans (seriously, what were they thinking?) or choosing nothing the year Pinjar and Tehzeeb and Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon came out, but it’s still got that little tinge of “wait, what?” which always comes with these announcements.
The Oscar nominees and potential Oscar nominees are finally available through cheap streaming and rental services! So I caught up on all the high quality American films that I missed when they were in theaters. Now, I know a regular amount about the American industry (I did get a Masters in film at an American university, I kind of couldn’t avoid it), but it’s not my main field. Plus, all of these movies were really really good, so if I was just looking at them in terms of how good they were, I wouldn’t have much to say besides “really really good”. So I’m going to go ahead and just rank them in terms of how “Indian” they were.
Oscar time again! And once again, I have seen basically none of the nominees. And I especially haven’t seen the foreign film nominees. And nor has anyone else. I don’t mean that they don’t play widely in America, for the most part the kind of films that get an Oscar nomination do pretty well in the art theaters around the country. But they don’t play around the world. Hollywood, Hong Kong, and India are objectively and demonstrability the most watched film industries in the world (with maybe Korea and Nigeria just barely beginning to give them a run for their money), and only one of them ever makes it to the Academy Awards. But I actually think there are some reasonable reasons for that. Not good, but reasonable.
(Mother India is, of course, the closest India has ever come to wining. Lost by a hair to Nights in Cabiria. Stupid Fellini)
dontcallitbollywood 